“How beautiful is the rain!After the dust and the heat,In the broad and fiery street,In the narrow lane,How beautiful is the rain!”

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

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“Sunshine without rain makes a desert”

-- Arabian Proverb

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“Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”

-- John Ruskin (1819-1900)

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Spring weather almost always includes showers. And the water from rain is, of course, essential for the survival of most life forms including human beings.

Actual “rainy days” aren’t as common as many people think. Rain usually comes in spurts, and a so-called rainy day will often include long non-rainy interludes.

As some of you know, rain has little impact on our hikes, except to heighten the beauty of waterfalls, rivers, and mountain streams that we regularly visit in spring.

With proper rainwear there’s no need to be uncomfortable when it rains. However, we actually find ourselves hiking in rain on only a handful of days each year.

For less experienced hikers who have concerns about rain, it can be a challenge to ignore all the negativity and weather-related fear-mongering that’s in the media.

Also, given the inaccuracy of weather forecasts, especially for the mountain areas where we hike, a predicted “rainy day” will sometime turns out to be a sunny one.

[Those of you who wait for a “perfect weather forecast” miss out on many beautiful hikes each year. Latest example: this past weekend, when there was a 50-70% chance of showers both days. Rain total on Saturday’s hike: none. Rain total on Sunday’s hike: none. Both days were great for hiking in the last of the melting snow].

Spring is by any measure a lovely season, with new plants and flowers appearing practically every day. Rain or shine, it’s a wonderful time to commune with nature.

Since some of you often ask questions about rain at this time of year, next week’s Update will include our annual review of “Rain & Weather Forecast Basics.”

“Everyone loves to talk about the weather, and this winter Mother Nature has served up a feast to chew on. Few parts of the US have been spared her wrath.

Severe drought and abnormally warm conditions continue in the west, with the first-ever rain-free January in San Francisco; bitter cold hangs tough over the upper Midwest and Northeast; and New England is being buried by a seemingly endless string of snowy nor’easters.

Yes, droughts, cold and snowstorms have happened before, but the persistence of this pattern over North America is starting to raise eyebrows. Is climate change at work here?

One thing we do know is that the polar jet stream – a fast river of wind up where jets fly that circumnavigates the northern hemisphere – has been doing some odd things in recent years.

Rather than circling in a relatively straight path, the jet stream has meandered more in north-south waves. In the west, it’s been bulging northward, arguably since December 2013 – a pattern dubbed the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” by meteorologists. In the east, we’ve seen its southern-dipping counterpart, which I call the “Terribly Tenacious Trough.”

These long-lived shifts from the polar jet stream’s typical pattern have been responsible for some wicked weather this winter, with cold Arctic winds blasting everywhere from the Windy City to the Big Apple for weeks at a time.

We know that climate change is increasing the odds of extreme weather such as heatwaves, droughts and unusually heavy precipitation events, but is it making these sticky jet-stream patterns more likely, too? Maybe.

…We do know… that the Arctic is changing in a wholesale way and at a pace that makes even Arctic scientists queasy. Take sea ice, for example. In only 30 years, its volume has declined by about 60%, which is causing ripple effects throughout the ocean, atmosphere, and ecosystem, both within the Arctic and beyond. I’ve been studying the Arctic atmosphere and sea ice my entire career and I never imagined I’d see the region change so much and so fast…”

“Last year was the hottest in earth’s recorded history, scientists reported on Friday, underscoring scientific warnings about the risks of runaway emissions and undermining claims by climate-change contrarians that global warming had somehow stopped.

Extreme heat blanketed Alaska and much of the western United States last year. Several European countries set temperature records. And the ocean surface was unusually warm virtually everywhere except around Antarctica, the scientists said, providing the energy that fueled damaging Pacific storms.

In the annals of climatology, 2014 now surpasses 2010 as the warmest year in a global temperature record that stretches back to 1880. The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997, a reflection of the relentless planetary warming that scientists say is a consequence of human emissions and poses profound long-term risks to civilization and to the natural world.

Of the large inhabited land areas, only the eastern half of the United States recorded below-average temperatures in 2014, a sort of mirror image of the unusual heat in the West. Some experts think the stuck-in-place weather pattern that produced those extremes in the United States is itself an indirect consequence of the release of greenhouse gases, though that is not proven.

Several scientists said the most remarkable thing about the 2014 record was that it occurred in a year that did not feature El Niño, a large-scale weather pattern in which the ocean dumps an enormous amount of heat into the atmosphere.

Longstanding claims by climate-change skeptics that global warming has stopped, seized on by politicians in Washington to justify inaction on emissions, depend on a particular starting year: 1998, when an unusually powerful El Niño produced the hottest year of the 20th century.

With the continued heating of the atmosphere and the surface of the ocean, 1998 is now being surpassed every four or five years, with 2014 being the first time that has happened in a year featuring no real El Niño pattern. Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, said the next time a strong El Niño occurs, it is likely to blow away all temperature records.

…February 1985 was the last time global temperatures fell below the 20th-century average for a given month, meaning that no one younger than 30 has ever lived through a below-average month.”

“We have seen a quantum jump in extreme weather events in the Northern Hemisphere in the last several years. Droughts, deluges, and heat waves are increasingly getting “stuck” or “blocked,” which in turn worsens and prolongs their impact beyond what might be expected just from the recent human-caused increase in global temperatures.

A growing body of research ties that unexpected jump to a weakening of the jet stream -- in particular to “more frequent high-amplitude (wavy) jet-stream configurations that favor persistent weather patterns,” as a new study puts it.

…Reinsurer Munich Re has the most comprehensive database of global natural catastrophes Their 2010 analysis, “Large number of weather extremes as strong indication of climate change,” concluded “it would seem that the only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change. The view that weather extremes are more frequent and intense due to global warming coincides with the current state of scientific knowledge…”

… the evidence is mounting that we have entered a new regime of extreme weather thanks to our as-yet unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gas…”

It’s common knowledge that we’re in an era of Climate Change (with the unfortunate footnote that millions of Americans have been miseducated to disbelieve science and the proven phenomenon and threat of global warming).

Weather records have periodically been broken for years, but that used to be an occasional event, whereas now “unusual weather” is practically the norm. Anyone who pays minimal attention to weather patterns is sure to be aware of that fact.

The winter that officially ended yesterday is a good example. Warm spells during winter have been increasingly common over the years, whereas they used to happen once or twice, if at all. This year the temps jumped up into the 50s or 60s several times.

That happened most often in February, when winter heat records were repeatedly broken. Then the first two weekends of March we had some of the coldest temperatures ever on our hikes (near zero in the mountains on at least 3 mornings).

As you probably know, global warming doesn’t mean that it’s warmer all the time, although average temps are higher. It also means unstable weather, with extreme temperature swings and more powerful storms, which can include big snowstorms.

Can we learn to live with such extremes? We’re actually more able to adjust and adapt than many plants and animals. After flowering, some plants may freeze and die, or their fruit may fail to develop. Migrating birds can be caught unprepared.

Fortunately those of us who are hikers can always don our warm layers and still get out on the trails – and thoroughly enjoy ourselves for a few hours -- which is exactly what we did during the bouts of bitter cold that greeted us on a few hikes.

Yes, it’s a bit of a shock to our system, and psychologically disorienting, to be walking around in a T-shirt one day and then, after a 50-degree drop, bundling up in thermals and other warm clothing the next. Fortunately we can still go hiking.

For those who are concerned about the environment and the state of our planet, the biggest potential problems lie in the long run if our ecosystem is destabilized.

As to the present, there are no real safety risks in going out even when it’s bitterly cold, of course, as long as we wear enough protective clothing. And as many of you know, the healthy exercise of hiking keeps us warm while we’re moving.

Actual outdoor danger is thankfully rare at any time of year (gale force winds, icy roads, powerful storms, etc.). At such times our trips will usually be cancelled, since it makes sense to stay home rather than put ourselves at unnecessary risk.

For now, let’s get ready to enjoy and celebrate spring (!), whatever weather it may bring. Are you open to the idea of enjoying the lovely season that lies ahead???

“We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all -- sunlight -- into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.

For all of that, the unbroken forest that once covered much of the continent is now shot through with holes.

Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind. What does that mean for the genetic fitness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” one eminent redwood researcher told me.

What we do know, however, suggests that what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.

Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.

In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment.

Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. We need to learn much more about the role these chemicals play in nature. One of these substances, taxane, from the Pacific yew tree, has become a powerful treatment for breast and other cancers. Aspirin’s active ingredient comes from willows.

Trees are greatly underutilized as an eco-technology. “Working trees” could absorb some of the excess phosphorus and nitrogen that run off farm fields and help heal the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth.

Trees are also the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays. The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning. Trees, of course, sequester carbon, a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science also found that water vapor from forests lowers ambient temperatures.”

-- Jim Robbins, from “Why Trees Matter, The New York Times, April 11, 2012

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Who doesn’t appreciate trees? Our Earth is unimaginable without trees and forests. We’re thankfully never out of sight of them in the mountain areas where we hike.

They deliver the oxygen we need to breathe, cool shade in the summer, never-ending beauty, and are “pillars” of the ecosystems that support so many life forms.

The primeval forests that once covered this continent and much of the world were destroyed long ago, but in spite of continued exploitation, major forests survive.

Trees thrive in many parts of the U.S., obviously including the Northeast, even though they must endure stresses and threats like logging, pollution, and disease.

Pockets of old-growth (virgin) forest remain in parts of the Adirondacks and other wilderness areas we visit. We’ll be camping in such an area this July 4th weekend.

Many birds and wildlife make their homes in or under trees and are sheltered and sustained by them. And who among us doesn’t enjoy resting beneath a lovely tree?

Like everything else, it’s possible to take trees for granted, even though they’re amazing “beings.” As we hike it’s worth noticing and acknowledging them!

“The results of [our] disconnection from nature and nature's pace show up in therapists' and doctors' offices every day. Living under unnatural time pressures causes a myriad of psychological, social and physical ailments. Delinked from the natural rhythms of our bodies and the rest of the planet, we struggle with diminishing success to adapt to the strange mechanical and disembodied world we have created.

As a practicing psychotherapist and ecotherapist, when I see patients who are suffering from depression or anxiety I ask them to keep a time-journal in which they record the hours and minutes spent each day outside, as well as the hours spent inside in front of a screen. My clients are often shocked to realize how disassociated they have become from nature and our species' natural ways of living, and the effect this disconnection is having on their psyche. In fact, a 2007 study from the University of Essex shows that a daily "dose" of walking outside in nature can be as effective at treating mild to moderate depression as expensive antidepressant medications that can sometimes have negative side-effects.

…Ecopsychological research is now proving that reconnecting with nature and more natural living performs a host of psychological miracles, including lowering depression, improving our sense of well being, calming our anxieties, raising self-esteem and giving us a sense of belonging to the great whole of which we are a part.”

-- Linda Buzzell, from “Slow Down: How Our Fast-Paced World Is Making Us Sick”, on Alternet (www.Alternet.org), July 2, 2009. The author is co-editor of Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind (Sierra Club Books, 2009).

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We all experience stress, and virtually all of us have been through crises in our lives. That could be said to include times of “national emergency,” such as major wars and terrorist attacks, which have thankfully been rare in our country.

Recent national events including our last election – and the current crisis of leadership in Washington -- have been deeply unsettling to many of us. Many people feel a sense of insecurity regarding our country that they’ve never known. Millions of people in other countries seem worried as well for good reason. It’s hard to be very optimistic about what the coming weeks and months may bring. And since anti-science climate-change deniers have taken charge, the health of natural world and our planet’s life-support systems are now at especially high risk.

Life is inherently an uncertain and all-too-fragile phenomenon, of course. And as conscious human beings, it’s only natural for our attention to focus particularly on problems and potential threats. For many of us, in fact, worry comes all too easily.

One of the best ways to resolve problems and assuage anxieties is to take action whenever possible. Unfortunately, many external events lie beyond our personal ability to resolve them, although there are always some things we can do.

We simply can’t bury our heads in the sand and try to ignore important national or world crises. At the same time, we all need to escape at times from the negative news of the day and the stress that bad news creates for us.

Leaving our everyday environments and traveling to hike in the natural world is taking one kind of action that won’t resolve such problems, but it can give us a breather from stress, allow us to unwind, and put us in a vastly better state of mind.